Wild Abandon (9 page)

“I suppose you’re the lure. The sirens. Kate, I’ve got to say I’m disappointed in you.”

“Tell us what’s wrong,” Janet said. “You’re shivering.”

“Yeah, that’s it, offer to warm me up.
You won’t get fucking near me
.”

Kate spoke slowly: “What are you talking about?”

He shouted into the woods. “Come out!” His giant lungs flapping. “Come out! I’m ready for you!”

There was the noise of disgruntled birds. Leaves shuffling. Albert, in his room, in a hammock, opened his eyes. Don was already at the window. He had been watching his wife.

“Sweetheart, let me put this round you,” Janet said, coming toward him with the blanket held up, matador-style. Patrick raised the table leg.

“I’m not gonna hurt you, Patrick. I’m Janet—you know me. We’re friends.”

“I know perfectly well who you are, you patronizing cow. I should’ve known all along.”

Kate came round the other side of the fire, followed by Freya.

“Put down the table leg,” Kate said. “Pat, what happened?” Janet said. “Should I call an ambulance?”

“That’s it. Pack me off!”

Janet took a step closer and raised the blanket up. Her eyes were red. They were closing in on both sides.

“You’re cold,” Janet said.

“
You’re
cold,” he said, raising the weapon.

Kate and Freya were treading slowly toward him.

“Back off!”

And then, dropping the table leg, he turned for the fire, ran toward it, his shivering body, his loose skin purple in patches, and leaped over the heat, the knee-high flames, his feet passing through them. He landed on the other side with a grunt, and was away, running. They watched him disappear, brief seams of flame in the pale hairs on the backs of his
calves, like lit brandy on a Christmas cake, the skinny legs clattering off into the woods.

Everyone was awake, standing round the last of the fire at the bottom of the garden. They were pale-faced, interrupted dreams just beginning to fade. Arlo was in his professional rugby coat, thigh-length, black, some shine from the polyester. There were four wwoofers (unprepared for the cold, wearing fashionable jackets) holding out their hands to the last of the fire. Isaac and Albert wore waterproof ponchos over jumpers over pajamas. In their hoods they did not look unlike the death-bringers that Patrick envisioned.

Don, in an act of deliberate melodrama, was out there in his blue casual kimono (which he wore around the house instead of a dressing gown) over pajamas, as well as a woolen hat and walking boots. He thought of himself as useful in an emergency.

They passed the table leg from person to person, each trying to gauge Patrick’s mind-set by moving their hand along its corniced midsection. The moon was bright, and if there was a night for finding a pale potbellied man running through undergrowth, this was it.

Janet was pacing. “Let’s just go,” she said.

Don pulled his kimono tight and tried not to be distracted by his wife, red-eyed and swaying slightly, holding her mug of wine.

“Janet’s right. We have to act fast. Freya, Arlo, Gabriella, and her friend, follow the river. Janet, Kate, you saw which direction he went, try to find his trail. You two,” he said, pointing to the Belarusian lads, “check the barn, workshop,
shed, polytunnels. Marina and Isaac, you man the headquarters. Stay inside. Albert and I will take the lane.”

This was a rare chance for a display of leaderly navigation. With the air of a sergeant letting his squadron know that they would not all come back alive, he said: “And I’m turning the mobile phones on.”

A torch for each group. They moved away from the fire, clutching their faces as the cold hit. Making their way into the dark, they were able to mark Don and Freya’s progress by the distant sound of months of text messages and voice mail finally coming home. This was the phones’ first genuine emergency. The needlessly loud message-received tone that nobody had ever learned how to change, like some strange birdcall, echoed back and forth through the woods.

The frozen puddles on the lane blinked in Don and Albert’s torchlight. Albert was worried and excited and full of the pleasures of a well-defined objective. His father seemed youthful, tying a knot in his obi.

“Dad, is this the beginning of end times?”

“No, Albert. Sometimes bad things just happen.”

They were now on the road and walking at pace. Albert had to jog every few steps to keep up.

“Marina says we’ll start to notice more and more bad things as we get closer.”

“Look for yellow cars and you see yellow cars. We call that ‘confirmation bias.’ I’ll teach you about it someday.”

“Okay, I’ll start looking for good things.”

“That’s better.”

“Do you think Patrick’s dead?”

“He’s not dead.”

“How do you know?”

“It’s an educated guess.”

“I want to make an educated guess. Is that something I’ll learn from the Soviet Hat?”

“Funnily enough, me and your mother were talking about that.”

Albert watched his father with wide eyes. “Oh my God, really?”

Don lifted his eyebrows and picked up the pace again.

“If you’re
really
good, then we might let you have a certain lesson
before
your thirteenth birthday.”

“Yes!” Albert said, and started conscientiously swinging his torchlight into the bushes at the side of the road.

From the woods they heard yelled reassurances: “We’re not out to get you!”

“We love you, Patrick!”

“We’re your friends!” This was just like the sort of hippie trust game that Don had always retreated from—that Blaen-y-Lllyn was definitively against—but now, occurring naturally in a dramatic situation, it filled Don with pride and adrenaline. Under torchlight, standing water showed the sudden April frost: shattered geometric sheets of ice. Along the bank, the saplings glittered.

Following the river were Freya, Arlo, and Gabby Casals—a Catalonian and regular visitor to Blaen-y-Llyn, this time returning with her new partner, Patricia, who looked beautiful when suddenly woken, and they held hands as they shushed through the semifrozen undergrowth.

“Patrick! Listen to your heart!” Arlo shouted.

Kate and Janet tried to locate and follow Patrick’s track, which began as a dark path scratched through the wet ground but soon faded to nothing. Janet was way out in front, climbing
over fallen trees and pushing, without complaint, through waist-high nettles.

As light started to seep in above the horizon, so the edges softened on Patrick’s paranoia. He was clinging to the branch of a low oak tree, his feet wedged in a Y-shaped split in the trunk. The one thing he was absolutely certain of—that his friends were out to kill him—was becoming unconvincing.

The difficulty was he didn’t want to be wrong. What if there was no fundamental problem and he should just be a bit more outward-looking and cut down on the weed a bit and try to help other people and practice a few new recipes, and that would be enough? He prayed to any God that this was not the solution. That
moderation
was not what he needed. That these people really were coming to shake him down, to tell him some home truths. That they came with a bolt gun and a panel saw.

In the cold, his body was shrinking. He had no toes; they had disappeared an hour ago. He had no feet. He had no hands, no nose. His ears were missing. His eyes made insectile clicks each time he blinked; they would freeze over if he gave them a chance. He was losing all the senses except for his tongue.

“Ahhhh!”

Even if he had wanted to call the names of the people he cared about, the cold would not let him pronounce them. Only vowel sounds remained. He heard voices coming from different sides.

“Ahh!”

He had no wrists, no elbows. And although he now knew, deep down, that they were not out to kill him, he would do
anything to delay their sympathy, their thoughtfulness, their forgiving.

He let himself fall from the tree he had climbed. There was a dry cracking sound. Everyone heard it.

He had no ankle to shatter.

Dragging himself onward, he stumbled, making small animal noises, with splinters of bone beneath his skin, while three parties closed in and Janet yelled: “Patrick! We’re coming!”

At the edge of the forest, where the National Trust boundary ended, there was a Taylor Wimpey homes development: a single cul-de-sac built on the edge of Llanmadoc, with views of the woods beyond. It had just been completed and no one had moved in yet.

Patrick crawled into the street. The windows were blank, no curtains, no trinkets, no cars in the drives, just ten subtly nonidentical detached homes, pine doors, tapered drives leading to one-car garages. In a curious and isolated nod toward a made-up past, there were replica Victorian streetlamps. A road shaped like a thermometer—a turning circle at one end.

In the lamplight, Patrick noticed that his ankle was grossly swollen, nearly the same size as his skull. He lugged himself to the center of the cul-de-sac’s bulb and flopped on the even concrete. His body shook. The streetlight was steady. He was the same color as the moon.

It was Janet who first spotted him and started running down the street, followed by Kate and, not far behind, Don, Albert, and the rest. A cloud of them, steam coming off their scalps. Patrick was curled up, but with his left leg stuck out in an attempt
to keep it numb. The ankle had ballooned, the shape of his foot lost to the swelling. He made the low gurgling noise of a radiator filling. Janet unbuttoned her coat as she ran, and behind her, the others followed suit. His thin boxer shorts were torn and stained, a purple testicle like a limpet against his thigh. They took off their clothes as they descended on him—just as he had feared—and smothered him in coats and jumpers, laying out everything they could and swaddling him until it was just his head at one end and, at the other, his broken ankle, a half-deflated football, a geodesic dome, the skin dying, turning gray and dusty at the edges, and the impossible angle of his foot.

While Janet efficiently tucked the clothes in around him, Don—who couldn’t look at the injury—made a display of knowledge, standing, speaking toward the mock-Victorian lamps.

“The predator here is the cold. Patrick is at risk of going hypothermic. He’s stopped shivering—that’s not good. It won’t be enough to simply cover him in coats. He needs body contact. Patrick, I am going to give you a hug.”

And with that, he retightened his robe, dropped to his knees, fell to his side on the blacktop, and spooned in behind. Patrick’s slack expression didn’t change. Don had a man’s-gotta-do-what-a-man’s-gotta-do tough-guy look, resting his jaw on Patrick’s shoulder. Freya rearranged the coats over both of them. Two heads peeking out, old friends, bonded by labor and a shared vision. Patrick’s eyes bulged a little as though trying to leap free.

Waiting for the ambulance, they took it in turns, snuggling in under the pile of jackets, passing on their body heat through
his pale, bluish back, the milk-white notches of his spinal column. Everyone was part of it. Patrick had decided to be silent, to not give them anything more. Even when feeling Janet’s small breasts and tangible nipples against his back, he kept quiet. She gripped him and put her warm lips against his neck. Now that it was her turn, she wouldn’t let anyone else take over. Patrick wondered how, when his body was under such extreme pressure, it still found time to siphon blood to appease his groin. Strangers put their hands on Patrick’s shoulder and squeezed mechanically, as though testing his pressure. After a while, Marina, Isaac, and the Belarusians turned up with thermoses. Isaac ran in loops round the cul-de-sac, blowing his breath, pretending to be a train.

No one but the newest of the wwoofers took notice of Don sitting on the pavement, wiping his eyes. He cried, on average, once per quarter. He liked the release. He was good at it. This sometimes involved a kind of play-blubbing, his mouth opening and closing before the real crying could begin.

They shivered by the roadside as the ambulance drove into the cul-de-sac. They felt like a cult then—in a good way—standing in a neat line with bed-heads as the flashing lights reflected off the white lilac bushes. The empty lounges and unfurnished bedrooms filled with blue light. Pulling into an empty drive, the ambulance backed up to where Patrick was lying. Freya knelt next to him, trying to keep him awake by asking why Miles Davis was overrated. They stood aside as two paramedics appeared from the back doors carrying plastic green briefcases.

“What’s his name?” the woman asked.

They replied in chorus.

Some of the group hoped the paramedics’ first reaction would be “Whoa, weird, what are you people even doing here? It’s five in the morning,” but it was as if the paramedics couldn’t see them. Don was in a
casual kimono
. There were
Spanish lesbians
here, for God’s sake. But there was no comment, no look. The paramedics just peeled away the layers of clothing until they found Patrick and Janet’s embalmed bodies at the center.

“Hello, Patrick? I’m Helen. How long have you been outside?”

He couldn’t speak though he was still conscious.

“About two and a half hours, we think,” Janet said, and she unclamped herself from behind him.

“Okay. Patrick, I’m going to give you some oxygen now.”

The other paramedic, a guy, brought a gas tank out of the ambulance, set it down with a clank, and put the respirator over Patrick’s face. There was a noise like automatic doors.

“Patrick, nod if you’ve taken any drugs or alcohol.”

He just stared. Freya said: “Only cannabis, as far as we know.”

“We’re going to give you something for the pain, okay?”

She looked for veins in his arms but couldn’t find any, so she injected the morphine into his bicep. Don stood next to his wife and put his arm around her. He still couldn’t look at the injury. They wrapped Patrick in silver and lifted him onto a cloth stretcher.

“Okay,” the paramedic said, “I need an adult to come with us.”

They all stood there listening to the engine, and in that
moment they realized, having ridden a wave of collective love for this hard-to-love older man, having all felt unified by their support for him—in spite of his laziness, his depression—that they were each expecting someone else to jump at the chance to ride in the ambulance, that there was surely someone—they each thought—who was the right person to go, one among them for whom it was clearly
best
, and no one wished to push in and say
me
because that one
right
person should be allowed to accompany Patrick at this important and high-octane time.